


i've got you (brother)

by sky_blue_hightops



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Ben Hargreeves Needs A Hug, Brother Feels, Brotherly Angst, Brothers, Canonical Character Death, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Good Brother Ben Hargreeves, I knew I was forgetting something, Insomnia, Kinda, No Apocalypse, Number Five | The Boy Has Issues, Number Five | The Boy Needs A Hug, Protective Ben Hargreeves, Touch-Starved, Trauma, ben literally mom friends so hard he manifests and can i just say mood, both of them are Sad and ben tries his best to Comfort, oh yeah, that should be a tag dang it, theyre both touch starved as all get out and lemme tell you i love that crap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-12
Updated: 2019-03-12
Packaged: 2019-11-15 16:08:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18076613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sky_blue_hightops/pseuds/sky_blue_hightops
Summary: Ben sits. He waits. Being a ghost lends itself pretty well to developing one’s sense of patience. A lot of sitting. A lot of waiting.This night, however, he’s not alone.





	i've got you (brother)

**Author's Note:**

> [Russian translation](https://ficbook.net/readfic/8018991) by catlucif!

Ben usually watches the others sleep. What else can he do, y’know? Ghosts don’t need sleep. And sometimes, he just...needs to see them.

(He tried to touch, once. Just a brush across Diego’s cheeks, to smooth out the frown. His fingers passed through.

He didn’t try again.)

So he sits. He waits. Being a ghost lends itself pretty well to developing one’s sense of patience. A lot of sitting. A lot of waiting.

This night, however, he’s not alone.

***

Five can’t sleep. He lies in bed, watching headlights dance across his ceiling, hearing the whiz of cars on the street below.

If he closes his eyes, if he lies perfectly still, fingers tangled in his sheets, it’s like...none of it had ever happened. If he rolls over, buries his face in his pillow, the smell of the laundry detergent is almost enough to drown out the smell of _burning_ that always seems to linger around him. Almost enough to forget.

He gets out of bed. He doesn’t want to forget, not tonight.

He lets his feet take him down the hallway, where he pauses for a moment at the top of the stairs. Memories of shouts, of laughs, of stuttered words, of the pre-mission scramble to get ready and the post-mission combination of exhilaration and exhaustion ring in his ears. Part of him misses the way things were, before he left. Part of him doesn’t.

He continues on to the room at the furthest end of the hall, stopping in front of the door. Even with it closed, he can hear Diego’s snores. He rests his hand on the doorknob, and with a moment’s hesitation, slowly twists it open.

Diego’s a blanket-covered lump in the bed, facing the door. The bed had been pushed so it was in the far corner of the room, so Diego has his back to the wall. Five can understand that feeling. He gently steps into the room, backs up to the wall beside the door, and slides to the ground.

The wood flooring is cold against the thin fabric of the pyjama pants Vanya had lent him, and he can’t suppress a shiver. Headlights pass over the ceiling much like how they had in Five’s room, and he contents himself with alternating between watching their soothing rhythm and the rise and fall of Diego’s chest.

He sits for an hour, six minutes, and thirty-three seconds. Diego’s breathing doesn’t so much as falter. Five matches his with Diego’s in the first seven minutes, and the panic beginning to claw at his lungs recedes after ten minutes. The tears pricking the corners of his eyes fade away after fourteen.

A shadow flickers in the corner of his eye at forty-seven minutes, and he turns to look, but nothing is there. That happened a lot, in the apocalypse. Shadows flicker. Figures move. The feeling of being watched creeps up your spine.

He shivers again, then rises and leaves Diego’s room as silently as he had entered.

***

He does the same with the others, cycling to the next room at the top of each hour - perches in Luther’s desk chair, listening to the way the bed creaks with each breath Luther takes; sits on Allison’s window seat, shaking at how her breath whistles and wheezes in her throat; curls up in Vanya’s arm chair, watching her hold her blankets close like a lifeline, like the contact she had craved but never gotten; sinks to the ground and presses himself to the side of Klaus’s bed, resisting the urge to grab the hand dangling off the edge. He sits, and waits, and tries not to cry, and does it all so quietly he fancies himself like a ghost, frozen in time, unable to do much else besides worry.

It’s no surprise his vigil ends with him in Ben’s room.

He opens the door, the knob stiff and rarely used, and the hinges groan at the movement. There is no body to watch breathe in this room. There is no one he must convince himself is still alive, still within arm’s reach. Just old memories, and a suppressed grief for a missing brother he never actually lost.

He sits on Ben’s bed, and begins to cry.

Ben molds out of the shadows along his wall, watching his brother shake and fall apart. He’s clearly exhausted, words broken by heaving breaths. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t here-” He hiccups. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry-”

The pain in Ben’s chest is paralyzing. He reaches a hand out, reaches both hands out, but they both pass through with the barest of cool tingles. Five shudders at the feeling, curls into himself harder. “Sorry,” he chokes out, voice wavering. “Ben, I miss you, _I miss you_ -”

Ben can’t raise his voice above a whisper, but it doesn’t matter anyways. “No, it’s not your fault, you couldn’t have done anything.” Five doesn’t react, still trapped in his own head, and Ben can feel his hands start to tremble. “Five, you have to listen to me-” He’s dimly aware of his own voice. "It wasn't-"

Five can't hear him. Of course he can't. Ben feels a flash of bitterness, of uselessness. Seventeen years of nonexistence, of watching and not _doing_ , of seeing his family torn apart from the inside out and being the same old deadweight he's been for almost two decades, no pun intended. He can feel himself crumbling, of whatever 'essence' he's made of unraveling. His chest hurts, and Five is  _right there-_

Five's voice is barely audible. He isn't crying out anymore, just shaking, just quiet. "I shouldn't have jumped. If I had stayed, if I had been there...I called out for you, Ben. I-I couldn't find you."

His brother's eyes, watery, reflecting moonlight, so  _old_ and so  _young_ at the same time, peer up from the ball Five's scrunched into to gaze out the window. He isn't talking to whatever memory of Ben he has. He isn't talking to himself. It's just a sad, hollow realization, made in an empty voice, one he might not have let himself process until now. "I couldn't... _find_ you." He never got to bury Ben, not like he did the others. "And then I found Vanya's book. You died and there wasn't a  _thing_ I could do about it, because I was stuck in the apocalypse, stuck because of my own  _pride_ _!"_ Five's hands are in his hair now, tugging, tension building and building. "I know you'd tell me it's not my fault, but if you were right then you'd be here now to tell me that yourself! _I wish I was wrong_ ," he laughs, but it's painful and choked down to every last breath. "I can't sleep anymore, you know? Too much death. Too much blood on my hands." Ben knows. He's seen it in every move Five makes, in every hidden yawn and every flash of horror that comes with drifting off at the dinner table. He does a lot of sitting, a lot of waiting, remember? So he does it now, sits on the edge of his own cold bed, lets his knee ghost through Five's, places his hand where Five's grips the blanket, and waits.

Five's all too happy to continue, eyes unfocused with the kind of bone-deep exhaustion that takes more than a few nights of good rest to chase away. "I don't really regret it, the killings. I'd do it again in a heartbeat if I had to. I would've done anything to get back. I  _did_  anything to get back." That was Five, fiercely protective Five, his broken moral compass set with his family at north. His hands release the blanket and he rests them in his lap, considering them, as if he can still see the blood. "All that death, and yours still happened."

There's nothing left of the shaking, crying, upset Five that had walked into this room. Just a broken, numb, tired shell. And maybe Five was right, about not being able to sleep for the nightmares. But Ben knows his brother better than that. Five wasn't so easily scared by nightmares. 

"You can't punish yourself for what happened to me," Ben says. "You shouldn't do this to yourself. You couldn't have known." Ben had stopped trying to blame himself, blame Dad, blame others for his death a long, long time ago, but never  _once_ had he thought of blaming Five. "Please try to sleep, I'm right here-"

He can't even finish his sentence, cut off by Five's derisive, scornful laughter. "I wonder how long I can keep going, without sleeping. Sounds nice. S'what coffee's for, isn't it? Fixes all problems. Well, that and alcohol." He flops backwards onto the bed, arms flung above his head. "There's really nothing stopping me. I bet I could do it."

The end of that sentence lifts, almost like he expects an answer, or maybe some form of discouragement from some presence he's only imagining is there, but despite Ben's best efforts, he can't even whisper out an audible reply. He’s never wanted so badly to help, to touch, to be able to say something, _anything_ -

\- across the hall, Klaus’s fists flicker blue. He stirs, fingers twitching, then rolls over and fades back into an uneasy sleep, then -

Ben appears.

There's no sound but of the cars on the street below, Five's ragged breathing, and Ben, doing his best to remember  _how_ to breathe.

Hope flares, briefly, in Five's eyes. "...Ben?" He doesn't question it, doesn't seem to care if it's really Ben (maybe back from the dead, maybe never died in the first place, maybe it was all in his head, maybe, maybe, maybe) or just his own imagination. He just stares, hopeful, caught off-guard.

"H-Hey, Five-" The breath he'd been working so hard on regaining is knocked out of his lungs from Five  _launching_ himself, lanky thirteen-year-old limbs and all, into Ben's lap. Ben doesn't know what touch is safe - for either of them, he realizes, at the discomfort from the way his jacket drags across his shoulders when his arms move - so he settles for a basic hug, arms wrapping around his smallest brother (at least now, at least like this, both so similar and so different than how they had been as kids).

It seems to do  _something_ , at the very least, judging by how both of them cling to each other. Ben's almost overwhelmed at the contact (would most definitely be overwhelmed if it weren't Five, who is for the moment content with tucking himself under Ben's chin and not hugging and squeezing in return, which, honestly, would be veering dangerously into panic-attack territory), but he isn't, and he's  _real_ and he's there, and Five is warm and in his  _arms_ , and he could cry because he's wanted something as simple as holding someone, as being held, for seventeen _years_ and then some-

And then he remembers Klaus's all-too short attempts to keep Ben solid, and his blood turns to ice at the thought of appearing only to leave Five alone now (at the thought of going back to drifting, incorporeal, transparent,  _alone_ ), and if he holds Five a little tighter, well, who can blame him.

They sit together, until they forget where one starts and the other ends, until the sun's almost above the horizon, until Five's yawning so hard his eyes water. "You should sleep," Ben reprimands, face pressed into Five's hair. He wishes they could stay here, obviously. Just a few more hours. But he can feel himself fading and Five fading, in different ways. They're running out of time nonetheless.

Five hums, already half-way asleep. "But..."

"No, it's okay. I'll be-" He chokes on the burn in the back of his throat from unshed tears, chokes on words neither of them had said to each other since they were kids. "I'll be here when you wake up."

The wide, sad eyes that turn on him are all too trusting. "Promise?"

"Yeah, Five," he whispers. "Promise."

 

**Author's Note:**

> title from 'brother' by kodaline because everything hurts and this is fine


End file.
